GLAD® and the Science of Reading IV: Comprehension (cont.)

Our last issue (https://shorturl.at/RIejJ) focused on a knowledge-based approach to reading comprehension. We discussed the points that building students’ background knowledge and teaching reading through content makes a difference in being able to comprehend a text.

This leads us to the question of what purpose, if any, is there in teaching reading comprehension strategies like summarization, compare/contrast, prediction, and main idea?

Tim Shanahan is the expert we will look to for the answer to this question, and then, of course, we have a GLAD® strategy to share to apply this wisdom.

Comprehension is two-pronged

Shanahan makes a distinction about the cognitive aspects of reading comprehension. He says that we need to be more specific when we talk about the broad topic of reading comprehension. Are we assessing if the student understands what he reads? Or are we asking him to remember or memorize the information to be used later for different activities like writing or discussions?

Understanding (comprehension) is a different skill or mental process than is remembering, and he calls that study skills.  

When we teach comprehension, we can differentiate our lesson type to hone-in on these two prongs of comprehension: understanding text (knowledge approach) and learning from text (strategies approach).

Knowledge approach

Understanding text is taught through a knowledge approach that we discussed in our last issue. We can’t teach kids to understand text, but we can build understanding through phonics instruction, vocabulary development, and helping students tap into their background knowledge. If they don’t have background knowledge, we build it with them.

Strategies approach

Once students understand what they are reading, then teaching comprehension strategies makes sense. We don’t teach reading comprehension strategies to help student understand the text, we teach them to get the reader ready to do something with that information.

Tim Shanahan writes that there are hundreds of studies that have shown that teaching reading comprehension strategies does help improve reading comprehension. They help the reader in two ways:

Slow down and think - The reader must slow down their reading to think about the information in the text. Thinking about the information will help them retain or remember the information to be used later. Understanding a text (knowledge approach) only requires the reader to read through it once, but learning from the text requires more cognition and metacognition.

As an example, as I’m writing this blog, I have 3 Tim Shanahan articles and about 5 others printed and on my desk in front of me. The first time I read through them I understood them and my brain exploded with a million ah-has.

However, to speak or write coherently about the topic I read through all the articles more than once (more than 2-3 times, actually), I reread certain passages, stopped and thought about them, highlighted words, circled others, and noted in the margin my connections to GLAD® strategies.

In the process of doing this writing, I am thinking about how to link ideas together in my own words, as well as metacognitively realizing how many reading comprehension strategies I am using. This brings us nicely to Shanahan’s second point about how reading comprehension strategies help the reader.

Guide students to pay attention – Reading comprehension strategies as study skills gives the reader tools to not only remember, but also retrieve information for later. Guiding students to pay attention to the organization of the text, identify main ideas versus supporting details, and perhaps how to highlight those ideas facilitates purposeful learning using text.

There are other strategies such as prediction, monitoring comprehension, or inferencing that also should be taught in our reading lessons. Inferencing is an interesting one. As we discussed in our last issue, you can’t teach kids how to inference.

It’s a brain process that happens naturally when the reader has sufficient background knowledge. If the reader knows nothing about the topic they are reading, then they can’t make inferences. However, as a skill, we can define it for students, teach them to identify when they are doing it, and teach them why it is important for their comprehension.

When does this type of instruction happen?

Usually, it is reading instruction that happens during reading lessons with teacher scaffolded text. Building knowledge, useful for understanding text, happens during content area instruction.

Here is our parting Tim Shanahan wisdom, “…sounds like reading lessons would be better off emphasizing the learning of content, rather than developing insights about text and reading and developing actions students can use in a purposeful way to think more about the text.”

He continues, “But that is not necessarily the case. Our emphasis on knowledge should not be the central goal of reading instruction…Reading strategies are something students are likely to learn only in a reading lesson. As such, they deserve special attention in those lessons.”

Clunkers & Links – This is a Project GLAD® strategy that can be used with students to monitor text understanding and practice reading comprehension strategies. It is done with a small group of readers at about the same level of independent reading.

In GLAD® training, we tell teachers this is a strategy for at or above grade-level readers. The reason for this is that the students will be reading silently during the small group and then taking the text with them to finish the reading independently.

However, a tweak I would like to offer is that as long as the text is one that is at the students’ independent reading level, we can use this strategy to monitor understanding of text and practice reading comprehension skills with all levels of readers. But again, in order to comprehend, they need to be able to read the chosen text fluently.  

The comprehension skills we are practicing include; using text features, survey, prediction, monitoring for understanding, asking questions, and inference. That’s quite a few packed in this powerful little guided reading strategy.

Delivery

Once you have your small group of homogenous readers and an appropriate text chosen, you will start by telling students the title of the text without showing the cover of the book. Students will use their background knowledge to predict what content and vocabulary they will encounter in the text.

Prediction requires the brain to activate its schema, or the brain’s cognitive framework of what it understands about the topic and brings this information forward into working memory. We’re priming the pump to get ready to read and attach new information.

Next, the teacher will introduce clunkers and links.

Clunkers – are anything that stop reading fluency. There are 3 types of clunkers.

• Decoding: words you can’t read
• Vocabulary: words you can read, but don’t know the meaning
• Context: words you can read and know what they mean, but they still don’t make sense. Examples may include homonyms or idioms.

Links -  are connections. We’re having students pay attention to their schema.

• Text to text (text can include input charts and other GLAD® strategies)
• Text to self (personal experience also build background knowledge)
• Text to world

The teacher will model for students with the first paragraph, or even first page of the reading, how to locate clunkers and links then flag them with a sticky to be discussed with the group later.

Students read silently, flagging their clunkers and links.

A suggestion Tim Shanahan makes for guided reading groups is when starting out with beginning readers in kindergarten and 1^st grade, all reading should be out loud. By the end of 1^st grade, teachers should switch to having students read silently. This encourages reading with comprehension. How will kids get good at silent reading comprehension if they are never asked to do so?

For some readers, silent reading is difficult up to middle school. Have them start with shorter passages and build up. Monitoring with clunkers and links will also help.

Another tweak offered by our National Training Center is to have students whisper read during this portion of the group so that the teacher can listen in and assist individuals how to find clunkers and links.

After students have read a portion of the text, engage the group in a discussion of their clunkers and links, recording them on a t-chart. This is where the teacher is actively supporting comprehension by helping with decoding, defining words, sketching, prompting rereading, identifying text features, answering questions, asking students to about inferences, and any other scaffolds that come up as needed for reading comprehension.

At the end of the group time, the teacher can introduce the SQ3R sheet that is a graphic organizer designed to help guide students’ independent reading of the rest of the text – or the next portion you are assigning. The SQ3R follows the same steps for moving through a text that was just modeled in the small group. Students can engage with this alone or with a partner.

Subsequent clunkers and links small groups will process through the clunkers and links students had and discuss the content. This is a great time for a mini lesson to focus on one of the reading comprehension strategies and to monitor students’ progress.

If you'd like to see Clunkers and Links in action check out the Next Steps Coaching Membership.

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Sources:

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/knowledge-or-comprehension-strategies-what-should-we-teach

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/why-main-idea-is-not-the-main-idea-or-how-best-to-teach-reading-comprehension

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/i-want-my-students-to-comprehend-am-i-teaching-the-wrong-kind-of-strategies